From left, Lovett Assistant Athletic Director Charlie Finch and the head of Lovett’s Green Team, senior William Smith, ride the Green Revolution bikes at Lovett.
A committee of students from Lovett’s Green Team unanimously voted to use funds from the budget of the Building and Grounds Committee to purchase three Green Revolution bicycles and the accompanying technology, which will convert the energy produced by peddling into the direct current that can be fed back into a building’s power grid.
The bikes were installed right after school began this year.
Lovett Assistant Athletic Director Charlie Finch first came across the Green Revolution bicycles, and he has been instrumental in helping Lovett become the first K–12 school in the nation to install them. The bikes are linked together and the energy that is generated will be displayed on a flat screen television monitor in the Hite Wellness Center. Physical education, physics and math teachers plan to use the data that is generated in their classrooms.
The hope is the new Green Revolution bicycles will raise awareness about alternative energy sources and help students, faculty and staff become healthier in the process. Lovett’s P.E. classes also may be able to field test some of the ideas about the relationship between exercise and learning that Dr. John Ratey has written about in his most recent book, “Spark.”
Since the bikes were installed, the school has generated, as of Oct. 24, 17,000 kWh of energy, enough energy to run 340 laptops for an hour, power a 27-inch, flat-screen TV for 148 hours or wash 48 loads of laundry. Lovett’s Green Team is monitoring the amount of energy generated weekly.
Information: visit www.lovett.org or www.egreenrevolution.com.
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